This wasn’t the first time she had sought Murray’s aid. Friedan first made a call to New Haven in 1965, after she read Murray quoted in The New York Times saying that women needed to march on Washington as civil rights activists had just done. They began corresponding. The two activists shared similar goals: both wanted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency established in July 1965, to take further action against sex discrimination and to enforce Title VII, a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prevented all forms of discrimination in the workplace.
It was Murray—a black queer woman who, as Friedan once put it, “had faced both kinds of discrimination [racism and sexism] and was strong for an organization”—who first suggested something like a women’s civil rights march. Friedan was intrigued, and she gathered more than a dozen women in her hotel room to strategize. By the end of the conference, the group had decided to form a new organization, a “kind of NAACP for women.”
NOW started with thirty members. By the time Friedan hosted this November press conference in her parlor, the group had grown to five hundred (including a handful of men). Chapters sprang up in cities across America. The group’s rhetoric was militant and their goals concrete: they wanted paid maternity leave, income tax deductions for child care, the enforcement of Title VII, and the repeal of anti-abortion laws. The group also advocated against sex discrimination in the government’s education, poverty, and welfare programs. These causes were personal to Friedan, who claimed that she had been let go from a news agency when she became pregnant. They announced that they would use sit-ins, pickets, and “ingenious new methods of protest” to win what they called “true equality” for women.
The women of NOW were in good company. By 1966, acts of protest and resistance were features of American public life. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 brought between 200,000 and 300,000 people to the national capital. In December 1964, Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement, encouraged a crowd of students at the University of California at Berkeley to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop!” And in 1965, there were at least three acts of self-immolation in protest of America’s military actions in Vietnam; the antiwar protests would continue for years. People from different parts of society came together to demand—to force—change.
And now women, long silenced, were starting to speak—loudly. A new social movement was officially under way.
* * *
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As women across the country came together, the Equivalents found their friend group falling apart. It began slowly and innocently: schedules failed to line up, visits were missed, there were more weeks between letters. The phone rang less often than one would like. Then small disagreements began to arise: Olsen queried her friends’ silences, Sexton resented Olsen’s self-indulgences, Sexton and Kumin strained to maintain a tight friendship as Kumin spent more and more time away from the suburbs. The visual artists didn’t seem to get embroiled in these little spats—throughout the 1960s, Swan remained close with the two poets, while Pineda continued to stay in close touch with Olsen and her daughters—but the three writers started to strain against each other.
The Equivalents also now found themselves out of step with other American women. Though Olsen and Pineda both identified as feminists, the other members of the group didn’t necessarily think of themselves or their work as “feminist,” though some who read and viewed them would disagree. According to Kumin’s son, Daniel (Danny when he was younger), Kumin didn’t start using the language of feminism until the women’s movement was in full swing. Swan considered herself “self-liberated and pre-liberated,” according to her daughter, Joanna. She had “kind of done her own thing,” and that thing, as she understood it, was artistically significant and formally radical, though not necessarily, in her eyes, political. Sexton was similar. Sexton “never applied the word ‘feminist’ to herself,” writes Linda in her memoir, though she also recalls Sexton’s curiosity about local feminist meetings. Sexton continued to view herself this way through the late 1960s and into the 1970s. In 1974, she confessed, “I hate the way I’m anthologized in women’s lib anthologies…They cull out the ‘hate men’ poems, and leave nothing else…The feminists are doing themselves a disservice to show just this.”
Their readers felt differently. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, women students, critics, and teachers used poems by Plath and Sexton to celebrate women’s experience. “Woman with Girdle,” a poem from Sexton’s All My Pretty Ones, is the realistic portrait of a woman’s body that so many activists wanted. The poem ends with the woman coming “into your redeeming skin,” a statement of celebration. It was of a piece with Sexton’s unflattering self-portraits, such as “Menstruation at Forty” and “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator.” In these poems, she wrote about female experiences that couldn’t yet be spoken about in public: this was before the abortion speak-outs of the late 1960s, before Our Bodies, Ourselves and woman-centered gynecology. Sexton’s great poetic intervention—the presentation of messy female experience as art—was also a political one. In writing about these topics before they entered public discourse, she was an inspiration and ahead of her time.
The sad irony of the Equivalents is that the movement they helped give birth to was not one in which they could participate fully. The Institute was the harbinger of a much more radical reordering of American society. As an institution, it was the beginning of something big, but for the first classes of fellows it was a mid-career move, a last pass at academia, a stopgap measure until more commissions came in. The Equivalents were women born too early; by the time the women’s movement gained full steam, each of them was well established in her life and ways.
Olsen was the only one of the five to identify as a feminist consistently and to see her creative career primarily in political terms. But even she raised an eyebrow at some of the ways that “women’s lib” infiltrated the world of arts and letters. One evening in 1965, Olsen tuned in to a radio program about “a new dev’t [development] in poetry: ‘domestic lady poets,’ ” which the critic, whom Olsen identified as Rella Lossy, defined as those poets “intensely involved in being women in children in domestic subjects they are satisfying what Yeats called the poets unsatisfied hunger for the commonplace,” as she later wrote to Sexton. Louise Bogan, Carolyn Kizer, and Sylvia Plath all apparently belonged to this category. So too did Sexton: the critic claimed she was, as Olsen wrote, “our most promising & prominent domestic lady poet”—“wish could see your expression,” Olsen wrote cheekily to her friend. The critic on the radio pointed to “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward,” a persona poem from Bedlam, as Sexton’s masterpiece. The poem is not Sexton’s best, a bit melodramatic and imagined rather than lived: Sexton had never been in the situation of the speaker, an unwed mother lying in a hospital where doctors “guess about the man who left me, / some pendulum soul, going the way men go / and leave you full of child.” Olsen claimed that if asked for Sexton’s best poem, she would have guessed at seventeen other poems before arriving at that one. In the letter she wrote to Sexton, she described the radio program with sarcasm.
It’s a bit surprising that Olsen objected to this celebration of female poetry, especially because it took place while she was revising “Silences”—an essay that is, among other things, about how women writers have historically been oppressed. But then Olsen never cared much for critics or for the academic study of literature; she objected to any teaching of literature that didn’t proceed from a reader’s immediate, emotional response. She also saw many commonalities among writers of different races and genders; this is why her first seminar talk at the Institute had cited Kafka and Hemingway as well as Woolf and Mansfield. She thus wasn’t inclined to discuss women writers in isolation from their contemporaries. She herself loved so many writers—Rilke and Teasdale, Melville
and Woolf—and her only criterion was how well they captured human experience.
It is in fact because of her deep commitment to artistic excellence that Olsen sometimes failed to support Kumin and Sexton, her friends and fellow writers, in the ways they would have liked. She praised her friends for their excellence and pushed them to achieve it. Once, writing to Kumin, she exhorted her to keep chasing prizes and public praise: “You need what you merit but have not had—recognition, yes, honor.” When Olsen applied for a Guggenheim grant some time after the Institute, she described the process as “last minute, of course, a literal holding my nose & getting the nasty stuff over with as fast as possible (have been retching ever since).” The whole economy felt sordid to her. She made it clear to all of her friends—Kumin and Sexton included—that she would never want to be asked for a blurb.
The trouble began, then, in February 1968, when the publisher of Kumin’s second novel, Harper & Row, reached out to Olsen for a blurb. Kumin’s novel, The Passions of Uxport, was slated to be published in April 1968. In writing it, Kumin had wanted to portray the “great passions that trouble all” through a close study of two women and their families in Uxport, a suburb eighteen miles from Boston and a clear fictionalization of Newton: “The suburb of Uxport was full of friends and cocktail parties, sit-ins, fund-raising hootenannies, political causes.” The novel follows Hallie Peakes, a thoughtful, intense, repressed teacher and writer undergoing psychoanalysis, and Sukey Davis, volatile and passionate, a painter with a sick child and a devoted husband. The major event of the novel is the death of Sukey’s daughter; she dies of leukemia. Minor characters include Ernie, a mentally ill man obsessed with burying roadkill; Dr. Osip Zemstvov, an old-school Freudian psychoanalyst who treats Hallie; and Teejoe, an untrustworthy colleague with whom Hallie has a brief affair. The early years of the Vietnam War (the novel begins in 1965) provide the backdrop for what is, ultimately, a kind of suburban melodrama; one reviewer, referring to a popular television soap opera, called it the “Boston version of Peyton Place.” Uxport is occasionally entertaining, but not especially insightful about either manners or mores.
A woman of principle, Olsen declined to write a blurb—not for a friend, not even for a friend whose first novel had sold poorly and who, according to Olsen, merited “recognition” and “honor.” “I wish the practice of bookjacket & ad quotes didn’t continue debased,” she wrote to Harper & Row, “for the few to whom my judgment might have meaning, I would want to help them to the joy of knowing these 2 so different books,” referring to Downstairs at Ramsey’s, a James Leigh novel that the publisher had sent her separately. She believed Kumin’s novel would “make its way to its earned literary place of honor regardless,” but she would not help it along in a public way. Instead, she claimed she would spread the word about the book to her friends, in the hopes that “some recognition of its achievement…might be nurturing for the author.” Grassroots promotion, in other words, though one wonders if Olsen, who didn’t love Uxport, ever followed up on these plans.
It was a gracious refusal, but when Kumin saw it weeks later, she feared that her friend was angry. Kumin wrote Olsen an apologetic and—for her—emotional letter. She explained that she had been in the hospital dealing with complications from a bladder infection, and she claimed that she had purposefully omitted Olsen’s name from the list of those to whom galleys would be sent because she knew Olsen was averse to providing blurbs to publishers. Though Kumin was remorseful about her publisher’s mistake, she was also hurt: Olsen had seen the product of years of work and said nothing. “I guess I feel pretty sad,” she wrote, coming as close as she would to emotional disclosure. “I don’t know how you felt about the book…In this instance the silence has begun to take on a menacing quality.” She closed with “fond greetings, even I, in spite of my acute but momentary paranoia.”
Olsen telegrammed immediately upon receiving Kumin’s letter. The message was dramatic and self-lacerating, as she often was when caught up in interpersonal conflict: “JUST HOME YOUR LETTER DEAREST MAX UNFORGIVABLE SILENCE AGONIZING AND SHAMEFUL TO ME NOT YOUR FINE BOOK BUT MY VORTEX INCAPACITY WILL TRY AGAIN AS HAVE FOR WEEKS TO RIGHT YOU BE WELL AND PROUD OF YOUR ACHIEVEMENT LOVINGLY EVEN IF THE RIGHT IS GONE FOR IT FAILED TO BE DEED.” She followed with a hasty letter in which she apologized again and empathized “when I think of how mysterious hurt wild baffled angry I would be had I sent you my galleys of a book intwo [sic] which I had put so much and then not to hear weeks months…it is a good book Max.” Olsen tended to shower her friends with love and affection while reserving any negative impressions of them or their work for third parties. She preferred evasion to open conflict.
Kumin wrote an even-tempered letter back, and for a moment the wound seemed to be sewn shut. But then Olsen, anxious and wanting to redeem herself in Kumin’s eyes, overcorrected for her silence and wrote a second letter. “Third hand I hear ‘Tillie didn’t like Max’s book; thats why she doesnt write her.’ NO Max. If that had been it—(remember me Max as you know me)—I would have written as a matter of course to tell you & to say why.” She praised the book, in a somewhat backhanded way: “Even that Passions came to be written at all is a miracle of achievement. All those months the pain & disability of your back…and you, you managed to work regardless.” But Olsen admired Kumin’s powers of description and made sure to quote some of the book’s most beautiful moments, in which the natural world comes alive: “the snow bees that flew into the headlight beams.”
But then she shifted into mentor mode, as if her maturity and relative success as a fiction writer made her into Kumin’s teacher. “I think I know what happened. (Not only your weakness that always you must fight: too trembling too modest too respectful too unsure, unrealizing of what you have.” Olsen thought that Kumin, in her fiction, consistently “turn[ed] away from what is deepest” and instead settled for what was easy: rather than represent a death, she spent all her time constructing minor characters. In Uxport, Kumin had avoided engaging more deeply with “marriage friendship humancloseness.”
An astute reader of fiction, Olsen wasn’t wrong. The Passions of Uxport often feels like light reading, despite Kumin’s increasing interest in politics. “I have never before had for so long a period so grossly an apocalyptic vision of the future,” Kumin had written to Olsen right around the time of the book’s publication. “It is very hard not to get completely caught up with my students, angry, articulate, passionately involved in militancy and pacifism.” She tried to do justice to the political moment in Uxport by having her characters reflect on the turmoil of the times. “Meanwhile, Black Power has now alienated liberal white support,” thinks Hallie at one point.
The U.S. is now bombing the supply depots of Haiphong. Not in the city, in the suburbs. Civilian casualties are light and unavoidable. The child of her best friend is dying of cancer. Except for, and yet because of this fact, she thinks she would gladly go to bed with Martin Davis. Fifty GI’s are encircled in the Vietnam jungle and their captain calls for air strikes. He knows full well that most of them will die.
Politics rarely impinge upon the characters’ behavior, however; the Peakes and Davis families remain cordoned off from danger. The problems in the novel are primarily domestic: an unplanned pregnancy, an ill-conceived affair. These are fine topics for the literary novel—Tolstoy, one of Olsen’s idols, did justice to them in Anna Karenina—but Kumin didn’t demonstrate the psychological acuity that characterizes the great novelist.
What she did get right, or close to right, was the friendship between the two protagonists—avatars of herself and Sexton. Hallie “was a nail biter and an outsider and was built…sparingly,” while Sukey “was a wild one, the lady artist; buxom, red-mouthed and noisy enough to be a Jew.” While Hallie dutifully commutes from her “up-country” farm to teach her courses at Rufus College (a stand-in for Tufts), Sukey destroys her failed paintings “in cold red paint blood” and spends t
ime at Braceland, a mental institution. “Nervous breakdown. Artists had lots of them,” Ernie, a kind of choral figure, explains. Hallie can’t help but pity Sukey’s husband, Martin, who does most of the child care and can’t even persuade his wife to stay in bed with him on a Sunday morning. Hallie helps Sukey through her rough patches, visiting her at Braceland and comforting her and Martin after their daughter’s death. Hallie has a one-night stand with her colleague Teejoe, but then quickly realizes that an affair is not going to be fulfilling. It becomes clear that Hallie is a reflexive caretaker: she arranges an illegal abortion for a niece (an event averted at the last minute by miscarriage) and sublimates her anger at her cheating husband by performing various domestic tasks. “Hallie, rise, wash out your eyes!” she remonstrates herself at one point. “Go now and baste the chicken; go now and whip the cream; take comfort from the unsorrowing Linda”—her daughter—“ankle deep in wood chips and manure: frosted with horsefly bites, each knee a molehill of saddle sores.” As in Kumin’s poetry, the natural world, and the sensory delights it offers, comes to the rescue.
Hallie’s self-respect depends on differentiating herself from her volatile friend by remaining responsible and in control, though she also envies Sukey’s emotional freedom and the ease that accompanies it. (Hallie has a stress stomachache throughout most of the novel, a manifestation of her inner, psychic conflict.) But Hallie can never be the freewheeling Sukey: Hallie regrets her affair, and she works through her marital problems. She is, to her occasional chagrin, the kind of woman who will fix a farmhouse rather than burn it down.
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